X12 - The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) chartered the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 to develop uniform standards for interindustry electronic interchange of business transactions— electronic data interchange (EDI). ASC X12 develops, maintains, interprets, publishes and promotes the proper use of American National and UN/EDIFACT International Electronic Data Interchange Standards. See also EDI. (Accredited Standards Committee X12: http://www.x12.org/x12org/about)

XML (Extensible Markup Language) - XML is the ‘Extensible Markup Language’ (extensible because it is not a fixed format like HTML). It is designed to enable the use of SGML on the World Wide Web. XML is designed `to make it easy and straightforward to use SGML on the Web: easy to define document types, easy to author and manage SGML-defined documents, and easy to transmit and share them across the Web. See also HTML and SGML. (W3C, World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org/XML)